Films & Schedules
- GREAT BRITAIN

DOWN TERRACE

DIRECTOR: Ben Wheatley - GREAT BRITAIN

Father and son gangsters freshly released from prison must keep their criminal enterprise afloat while trying to figure out who ratted them out. Was it Bill's wife or their despised family "friend"? Anyone is a suspect in this blackly comic piece of criminal realism.

Ken Loach meets “The Sopranos” might characterize this darkly comic and sometimes disturbing slice of social surrealism in which a family of dysfunctional crooks tries to keep their criminal enterprise from falling apart. As soon as Bill (Bob Hill) and his son Karl (Rob Hill) are released from jail, they try to figure out who ratted them out to the police. Bill’s partner (Julia Deakin) seems like your average housewife, but there’s something about her that suggests she may have had a hand in it. It soon becomes evident that this ordinary terraced house is packed to the rafters with gangsters. Among others, we meet a despised family “friend” (Tony Way), a hit man (Michael Smiley) who takes his toddler along on jobs, Karl’s pregnant girlfriend (Kali Peacock), and a nasty piece of work named Eric (David Schaal). Paranoia reigns supreme in this house, where everyone is suspicious of everyone else.

FISH TANK

DIRECTOR: Andrea Arnold - GREAT BRITAIN

Fish Tank is the story of an alienated Essex teenager whose life becomes even more complicated when her mom brings home a new boyfriend.

Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize for her first film, Red Road (PIFF 31), Arnold has won it again for her second, Fish Tank. Mia (Kate Jarvis), a sullen and volatile 15-year-old, lives with her single mother and little sister in a dreary working-class housing project in Essex. Ostracized at school and angry at the world, Mia’s only solace is her private passion for hip-hop dancing, which she practices incessantly. When her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home a mysterious, charming stranger named Connor (Michael Fassbender, Hunger), who just might be the calming father figure the family needs, an emotional, if not sexual, chemistry between he and Mia soon adds a new dimension to a charged family atmosphere. One of Britain’s strongest new cinematic voices, Arnold reaffirms her talent for gripping, emotionally-charged realism, and for finding beautiful poetry in the bleakest of lives.

LOOKING FOR ERIC

DIRECTOR: Ken Loach - GREAT BRITAIN

Loach makes an unexpected leap into romantic comedy in this tale of a lovelorn mailman who receives some unexpected life coaching from Manchester United star Eric Cardona.

Loach and longtime screenwriter/collaborator Paul Laverty shift from their more despondent social-realist meditations to this fanciful romantic comedy, a whimsical, life-affirming nod to the possibility of second chances. Postman Eric Bishop has hit a true low: his two lazy stepsons ignore him, his second marriage is in ruins, a car accident lands him in the hospital—and that’s just the start of his troubles. The lovelorn Eric meanwhile pines for former wife Lily but lacks the confidence to reconnect. While his friends contrive to help him out, often to hilarious effect, the person who finally comes through is another Eric: Manchester United soccer icon Eric Cantona (playing himself), who appears rather unexpectedly in Bishop’s bedroom, offering the sage advice on life and love that Eric needs to turn his life around.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

DIRECTOR: Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross - GREAT BRITAIN

An investigation of "disaster capitalism", based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war, and terror to establish its dominance.

“Based on the best-selling book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine seeks to explain the rise of disaster capitalism: the exploitation of moments of crisis in vulnerable countries by governments and big business. The film traces the doctrine’s beginnings in the radical theories of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and its subsequent implementation over the past 40 years in countries as disparate as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain, and most recently through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross use a brand of artistic license to present a cinematic experience that takes this theory to a new audience. Warning: After viewing this film, you may interpret our world history in a new light.”—Sundance Film Festival.

SONS OF CUBA

DIRECTOR: Andrew Lang - GREAT BRITAIN

Sons of Cuba follows three boys at the prestigious Havana Boxing Academy as they prepare for the 2006 National Boxing Championship of Under-12’s.

Sons of Cuba is set in the legendary Havana Boxing Academy, no ordinary institution: this is a boarding school that handpicks nine-year-old boys and turns them into the best boxers in the world. The results have been stunning—Cuba has dominated Olympic boxing for the past quarter of a century. The boys’ duties extend far beyond the ring: they are groomed not only as world-class fighters, but also as international symbols of their country. Castro dubs them “the standard bearers of the Revolution.” Lang follows three young hopefuls through eight dramatic months of training and schooling as they prepare for the biggest event of their lives, Cuba’s National Boxing Championship for Under-12’s. During the season, crisis strikes: Fidel Castro, the boys’ leader and inspiration, is taken ill, and all of Cuba’s Olympic boxing champions defect to the USA, leaving the boys contemplating a future which is altogether different from the one they have been taught to believe in.